TELEVISION
Television is a telecommunication
system for broadcasting and receiving moving pictures
and sound over a distance. The term has come to refer
to all the aspects of television from the television
set to the programming and transmission. The word
is derived from mixed Latin and Greek roots, meaning
"far sight": Greek τῆλε
"tele", far, and Latin visio-n, sight (from
video, vis- to see).
Television was not invented by a single person, but
by several individuals. The origins of what would
become today's television system can be traced back
to the discovery of the photoconductivity of the element
selenium by Willoughby Smith in 1873 followed by the
work on the telectroscope and the invention of the
scanning disk by Paul Nipkow in 1884. All practical
television systems use the fundamental idea of scanning
an image to produce a time series signal representation.
That representation is then transmitted to a device
to reverse the scanning process. The final device,
the television (or TV set), relies on the human eye
to integrate the result into a coherent image.
